All posts tagged Holland

If you were to rank all the desperate initiatives that cash-strapped governments have put forward to solve the financial crisis, speed-dating would probably go near the top.

For those not familiar with the concept, in a traditional speed date, single people looking for love get a few minutes to chat up a prospective partner before a bell rings and everyone moves round one space. At the end, boxes are ticked or left empty and some hearts are broken. Apparently.

The business version is a little drier, but the principles are the same.

About 230,000 Icelandic voters went to the polls Saturday to reject a renegotiated deal to compensate Britain and The Netherlands over the 2008 collapse of Icesave bank.

Those in London who are now scratching their heads about how Icelanders could reject the new and improved Icesave deal should cast their minds back to October 2008 when Gordon Brown’s government invoked anti-terrorist legislation to freeze the U.K. assets of Landsbanki Islands—the bank behind Icesave.

In doing so London moved the Icesave debate from a question of economics to a question of national identity and stymied any chance of a negotiated agreement from day one, says Eirikur Bergmann, a political scientist at Bifrost University, Iceland.

“A key aspect of the Icelandic national psyche is not giving into foreign pressure… and when the UK authorities used the anti-terrorist legislation they put the Icesave issue in that political field and the [Icelandic] government was never able to lift it out,” Mr. Bergmann says.

The new deal Icelanders rejected at the weekend offered much better terms of repayment than a deal proposed last year, which was also rejected at a referendum. But it seems that both packages were destined to fail from the moment the president decided to put them to a public vote.

Icelanders feel Gordon Brown’s government wrecked any chance of a settlement when it chose to play hard ball. These people, after all, have managed to eek out a living on a windswept lava field in the North Atlantic for hundreds of years without much bother.